Grandpa Stories

Dedication

This is work dedicated to the people who helped build and sustain me:

• Tippy McCann – taught me to be a man and a dad, I can never repay the debt I owe and will die wishing I had one more minute to love her.

• Mary Ann McCann – was a flawed mother and brilliant woman who taught me to respect my own intellect, a gift it took me years to appreciate.

• Sandee McCann – is the classically beautiful woman that became the second wife that my Dad did not deserve and a kind good hearted step mother that Pat and I probably didn’t deserve either. Always a lucky man, my dad.

• James Emmet McCann, Jr. – ‘Bud’ My father, my friend. He was the last of the old school gentleman. I think he is smiling today as I describe him as a, ‘Rascal of the Highest Order’. He was perhaps the best writer that I have ever read and no matter how many times I begged him, would not write a book. He taught me the value of saying what I am willing to do and then doing it.

• Heide Hoffmann – H-squared is one of the smartest, most interesting and sweetest people on our sorry little planet. I met her in Germany and after all these years she is still helping me but from New Zealand now.

• My Brothers and Sisters – With two moms and a rascal for a Dad, this is an unlikely group of connected people. I love them all and I know they love me. That’s enough and if it’s not, then you aren’t paying attention.

• GLCPS&L Society – Great Left Coast Poker Smoke and Lies Society – My poker buddies - Darrell Datte, Paul Dunne, Alan Thorpe, Bruce Paddy and Gene Esquivel. We almost never agree but I have cherished the hours we have spent together without exception

• All of the other people who loved me and celebrated my strengths and overlooked my flaws. I have to live with me. But you all just kept nurturing me and helping find more of what should be kept and what should be jettisoned. You know who you are and how grateful I am.

This book was built for the ‘creepazoids’- Darrian, BJ, Asa and Chloe. I just wanted to leave them something that may or may not help them in their journey through life. This is a collection of stories told by their grandpa but not specifically related to my role as their grandpa. It is my hope that these stories will be helpful and entertaining. The little people who made me a grandpa keep getting bigger, smarter and prettier as I get older, dumber and uglier. They are the best things that my kids ever did just as their folks, Sean and Jess, are the best thing that I ever did.

PART ONE

Boyhood in my Time

Introducing My Grandpas and Me

I have two grandpas. One was a legend and the other was a man. James Emmet McCann was a man that I met as a boy. I met Frederick Hedeman from the look on my mom’s face whenever she spoke of him, from my grandma’s stories and from the items he left behind.

Frederick Hedeman grew up and died in the Michigan and Ohio area. The story I heard is that he died at the age of thirty eight in a tuberculosis sanatorium. He was a strong, confident man who loved life. He worked for Sears. According to my mom and grandma, he created the truck tire business for Sears. No one believed his ideas that Sears could get into the truck tire business and year on year he proved them wrong. They kept reducing his commission percentages as the business grew. He was a great outdoorsman and loved fishing and hunting. He fell in love with my grandma in elementary school. He was a lifelong Mason as was my Grandmother (Blue Stars they called the woman’s side of things). My mom and my grandma Margret serviced his legend to their dying days. He helped me very many times. He was in the room everyday when I would challenge my mother or grandma for the authority to be me. They let me learn about fishing, hunting and camping virtually supervised by my grandfather Fred. Thank you Grandpa Fred!

James Emmet McCann hailed from Chicago. He was an insurance man and did very well. He worked until he was just past his fiftieth birthday and retired first to Miami and later, to Pompano Beach. He was married to a statuesque blonde Nordic descendent woman. Peggy McCann was a lot taller than my Grandpa Jim. She was very nice to my brother Pat and I. She worried that we were not eating enough or having appropriate bowel movements. I am not sure how many generations Grandpa Jim was from the ‘old country,’ but he made it seem like it was weeks every time we saw him.

Grandpa Jim and Grandma Peggy had a nice pink Miami house on SW 62nd Ct with those white hurricane shutter things that you could lower over the windows when a storm came through. We lived with them for some time but our time there is a fuzzy little kid memory. The only clear memory I have is of an incident when I was four or five involving my dad’s car. I think we were planning to move to Cutler Ridge in 1957 or 1958. One morning I got up early and washed and filled up my dad’s car. The washing part was okay, but I could tell that dad was not pleased with my ‘filling up’ the car with the garden hose. Seeing me there with the hose, putting on the gas cap, saluting and reporting that she is all ready to go should have given him some idea of what I had done. Evidently, he was in a hurry and didn’t connect it all until the car started then died a couple of times and then wouldn’t even start. I am pretty sure my Dad wanted to kill me but he didn’t even raise his voice to me. He just told me to put the hose back where I found it and not to ever put any more water into any of our cars. I was very worried about Grandpa Jim when my Dad told him about my ‘good’ deed, because he couldn’t seem to stop laughing long enough to breath. He turned bright red in the face and actually had to leave the room. Every time he came back and saw my Dad’s face it would all start back up again.

We moved to another house for a little while before we moved to Cutler Ridge. The best thing about that house was that next door there was a Puma. Yep, a Cougar or Mountain Lion, was living right next door. I don’t remember her name but I do remember that she was affectionate and a fun playmate. Even Poody, our little Cocker Spaniel, loved that big old cat.

Cutler Ridge appeared to be reclamation of a coastal habitat that prior to being a 1950s GI Bill suburban development, had been dedicated to the sexual pursuit of blue land crabs. Land crabs are fairly aggressive crustaceans, especially when fully horned up and needing to get busy. Humans then plop down these GI Bill houses by the hundreds – this would seem to be a natural ecosystem conflict. The result of this conflict was to find thousands of blue land crabs covering your lawns, porches, driveways and roadways for several months of the year. That is until the crabs had the good taste to die in sufficient numbers so as to make the whole issue go away.

My First Big Decision

While we were still living with Grandpa Jim and Grandma Peggy I started Nursery School. I think it was pretty soon after I lived through filling my dad’s car up with water because it was my Dad who drove me to nursery school the first day. I remember it was both scary and exciting that morning. I guess my Mom and Dad had been trying to prepare me for my first day of school. We parked the car and he led by the hand up what seemed like a long walkway. I remember it had been raining and there were standing puddles on the other side of the fence under this huge Banyan Tree that grew in the side yard of this plain South Florida house that was going to be my nursery school.

Dad suddenly stopped and bent down to talk to me. He was very serious. He said, Hoot, you have to make a decision now. Once we go through that door and we introduce you to your teacher you are going to be called that name for the rest of the time you are at school and maybe for the rest of your life. I was stunned. I had a name. I was called, ‘Hoot’ and had been for as long as I could remember. I said something to that effect. My Dad said, That’s right. You have always been Hoot, but Hoot is what they all a nick name. It’s not your real name. Some people, like your Grandpa Jim and Grandma Peggy call me Bud, but my real name is James or Jim. Your nick name is Hoot, but your real name is James or Jim like me and your Grandpa or you could use your middle name, Fred or Frederick or you can be called Hoot if you want. I thought about all that for minute or two.

I asked him if they called him Bud at home when he was first starting to going to school. He said, Yes they did and they still call me Bud whenever I visit them. But he also said, No one offered me the choice that I am offering you. When I went to school my Mom filled out the forms and they started calling me Jim right away and for a while it was a little confusing, but I figured it out. Now everyone except Grandma and Grandpa and my sister, your aunt, call me, Jim. Your mom and I talked about it and decided to give you the choice. What do you want to be called when we go in there?"

I thought about it hard. I must have made a face because my Dad laughed out loud and said, Any other questions? I said, If they had asked you what would you have decided? He said, I would have chosen Bud because like you that is what everyone had called me all my life up to that point, but I have to tell you, Bud is a lot more common that Hoot. We called you Hoot because it was the first word that you really said clearly and you really liked saying because you said over and over again. so we just started calling you that. I am not too sure how the other kids or your teachers are going to react to you being called, Hoot. I can promise you though; they will not have another Hoot in your class or maybe in your whole school growing up! I thought about it some more. Dad just laughed again and said, You have to decide pretty soon, because I have to go to work.

I said, Well if you and Grandpa are both Jims I don’t want to be called Jim. James sounds way too grown up for me and so does Frederick. If I can’t be Hoot I guess I will be Fred like Mom’s Dad. He said, Well that all makes pretty good sense. Fred is a good name. You’re Mom and Grandma Margret will both be happy that you chose it. Are you sure you don’t want be Hoot? It’s not too late I said, No, I am going to school and it’s time that I grew up some.

When we walked through the door, my Dad told them my name, but that I went by Fred. I think for the first few days they thought I had a hearing problem because I didn’t always answer. I was bored a lot because I already knew my colors and numbers up to ten. I mostly watched the other kids and stared out the window.

The other thing that I did was caught a Skink. A Skink is one of the prettiest lizards that live in South Florida. It has shiny, black skin with powder blue and silver stripes down its body. They are wicked fast and hard to catch, but I caught one and kept him in a big match box outside in the Banyan tree. I called him Hoot, till a big rain storm soaked my matchbox and he got away.

I was Fred all the way through school and while I was in the Navy. In 1984 at another turning point in my life, I decided to go by James which is what I am called today.

I sometimes wonder how different my life would have been had I chosen to go by Hoot. I guess in many ways it didn’t really matter, I have always been a Hoot inside.

Coconut Trees and ‘Fishing’ for Grunts

When we moved out to the wilds of Cutler Ridge, my grandmother, Margret decided to buy a house about a block away which turned out to be very helpful. It was in Cutler Ridge that the whole growing up game changed for me and my brother Pat. I was six years old when my mom found about my dad’s girlfriend who ultimately became my Stepmom, Sandee. The divorce didn’t take very long after that. It took a full year and a half for the bank to foreclose on our house. My grandma Margret helped out a lot. Mom would get up before dark each day and come home well after we had gone to bed. Even with my grandmother’s help, my mom simply did not make enough money to carry the house without help from my dad.

I got my first job in Cutler Ridge quite by accident. The men who worked at the local sewer plant played this game with me after school. I would always be hanging around near the entrance and the guys coming back to the treatment plant would show me a piece of paper which I pretended was their official pass and I would open the gate for them. At the end of each week one of the guys would slip me five dollars. This was all fun and games until one day a limousine pulled up with the CEO and a number of investors. Their driver didn’t know to show the paper and I wouldn’t let them in. The CEO came out of the car and talked to me. He convinced me to open the gate and made me promise to bring my mom to see him at his office. It was then that mom found out that I was slipping my money into her purse each week. I had gotten my butt whipped one time because she caught me in her wallet, but she didn’t know I actually was putting money into it rather thank taking money out. In the end, the Water and Sewer Company's lawyers would not let me continue to ‘work’ but the CEO did give my mom my final check and a nice letter that pretty much said how much they really appreciated my actively hanging out by their gate and agreeing not to sue them into the Stone Age. I liked the idea of working for money to help out my mom and did it a lot over the years, but I never got caught again.

My mom and dad got divorced around 1958. I was six years old. Mom had to get up when it was dark and didn’t come home till it was almost time for bed each day. She worked very hard, making it difficult for her to have much of a social life. She had a number of good friends and ended up dating a few nice men. A ‘newly divorced’ single mom however, was not the common social status that it is today. Most of the guys she dated had no ‘Dad’ experiences and were not too sure about how they felt about an ‘instant family.’ If the truth be told, they probably saw in my Mom a fairly lonely, vulnerable woman with complications - namely my brother Pat and me.

In their search for the right approach to establishing themselves as ‘one of the good guys’ worthy of semi regular sexual favors, they came up with some fairly creative ways to bond with her complications.

One of these heroes brought over a coconut and a shovel one fine Saturday morning. For those of you who are not familiar with Florida, I should share with you that the geology of southern Florida pretty much consists of a very thin layer of sandy dirt over a coral rock. Our determined bonder of men young and old was apparently from another geological planet called Ohio, where there are apparently several miles of deep, rich, soft shovel-able loamy dirt where one could simply dig a hole, drop the bonding agent (in this case a coconut), let the young lads fill it back in, and water the hole daily until the ambition of the entire bonding cycle was completed. Some would wait until Mom could get past that ‘all men were scum like our dad’ part and accept that this might be a decent person, whichever came first. After several brutal stabs and finally executing a number of maneuvers that what can best be described as, ‘pogo shoveling,’ we were off to find a hardware store to buy a pick or dynamite to penetrate the determination of Florida’s coral rock, while reclaiming as much dignity as possible. Without using the tried and true methods of a circus ringleader or a baseball game announcer, suffice it to say that the most endearing trait our new friend would demonstrate was tenacity. He would not give up and our bonding coconut was planted promptly two Saturdays later.

There is a very happy ending though. I actually have no idea if his romantic ambitions were realized, other than to report it did not happen prior to my bed time. Once the hole was dug though, we planted the coconut and covered it with the potting soil he bought with the second pick (the first one was a Chinese or Korean job purchased from Jefferson’s and broke on the second swing on the second Saturday). My brother and I then religiously watered our muddy hole in the front yard. To everyone’s amazement, that coconut tree grew to be about twenty feet tall before Hurricane Andrew took it in 1992.

Another memorable (at least for me) bonding episode was hugely successful for all concerned. About six months later, while we were still watering the mud hole, another suitor took Mom’s complications to catch fish in a boat on the bay. I hesitate to call it fishing for a couple of reasons. The first one is the shortest one to tell. The fact is that this fellow had a friend who worked in the Marine Patrol. His friend gave him the exact coordinates for a ‘Grunt Hole.’ This species of reef fish similar to a snapper, is a lovely, white colored fish with orange dashes along its body on each side. Three other traits however, make Grunts a great bonding agent as opposed to say, planting coconuts. The first is that they literally grunt when they are taken off the hook out of the water. This feature won over Mom’s complications instantly. To this day, I can and I assume that Pat can deliver a fairly accurate imitation of a freshly pissed off Grunt. The second is that they like to find holes in the reefs and congregate in large, easy to catch numbers. The last thing is they will continue to bite your baited hook as long as you put it in the hole. My brother and I caught one hundred and four Grunts before we were too tired to reel any more in. Of course, as soon as we got home from being out on the bay most of the day in the time before sun screen was invented, all we wanted was to get into a shower, put some vinegar on our poor glowing, red little bodies and then collapse into bed.

Once again, proving that no good deed goes unpunished, this nice man ended up cleaning fish until way after midnight according to my mom. I am not sure if it was the prospect of perpetual fish cleaning, or the idea of dealing with my brother and me on a regular basis, but he wasn’t around so much after our fishing day. We ate Grunt for months and gave the fillets away at every chance. It was great, but too much is just too much.

My brother and I both fell in love with fishing on that boat that sunny Saturday morning. I still fish to this day even though my Grandpa Jim came very close to killing the joy of fishing for us when we went to visit him and Grandma Peggy in Pompano, but that is another story all together.

Fishing with Grandpa Jim

My Grandpa Jim was a character. He had tons of charm and a twinkle in his eye for all women, children and dogs. He still had a fairly thick trace of Gaelic in his speech perhaps with a little Chicagoan on the side as well . It wasn’t as strong as his Chicago accent, but it was there. And he had lots of ‘old country’ sayings that I always loved. He would make us laugh so much and so hard. He was a relatively slight man. He was about 5 feet 8 inches tall with a deeply receding hair line and silvery grey hair that was slicked back by all the Brylcreem you would care to smell. I guess he didn’t subscribe to their motto, ‘A little dab will do you.’ His blue eyes were crinkled in the corners and sometimes his dentures clicked when he laughed. He wouldn’t shave for a few days before we came to visit and delighted in our squeals of dubious joy when his greetings turned into a surprising encounter with old man sandpaper.

I don’t remember too many, ‘When I was a boy...’ stories from Grandpa Jim. He was one of those people who seemed self-sustaining as such that he had no past, and was totally committed to this single second with you. He was seldom distracted from his grandkids. If we were in the room, Grandpa Jim was engaged and finding ways to make us laugh.

Long before my brother and I came into the world, my good Catholic grandparents stopped liking each other. Looking back, I can now tell how hard they had to work at being civil to each other, ‘for the sake of the children.’ I share all this family drama with you to explain a couple of things about how important it was for us ‘men’ to go fishing as often as possible when we came to visit. He and Grandma Peggy had this competition going as to which of them we were going to like more. Grandma Peggy had a serious advantage. She could cook, and she specialized in rich Norwegian dishes and desserts. She had a complete inability to make any dish without creating enough food for ten people, which suited my brother and I because we could eat more food than any three adults. Even this advantage however, was diminished some by my Grandpa Jim’s charm. When Grandma Peggy cooked chicken for us, she would cook three chickens. One chicken each for Pat and I and one chicken for the rest of the family. Plus she would put together all of the trimmings and wonderful fresh Norwegian rolls. My brother and I were like little vacuum cleaners sucking up all of the food she put in front of us. Grandpa used to stand in amazement of how much we consumed. He would then come over next to our chairs and start knocking on our legs and saying, Sure and you be bringing hollow legs to me dinner table dont’cha now lad? Pat and I would crack up.

With the constant flow of wonderful food, Grandpa Jim thought he had to come up with lots of creative ways to swing our fondness his way. The fact is, we pretty much loved them equally and a great deal at that. We enjoyed being with them alone because they were very tense together. They were so different from each other that it was hard to believe they had been married for over forty years by then.

Grandpa took us fishing almost every time we came to visit. Before we went though, we had to go to the store and buy a bunch of fishing stuff - rods and reels, tackle box, and just about any other fishing gear you can think of. It was the best of everything that Sears had to offer. Then we would drive the five miles to the Pompano Fishing Pier. We would stop at the bait shop at the head of the pier, and get us all a Cream Soda, a bag of ice for the fish we were going to catch and paid our admission to the pier. We would then drag all of our stuff through the swinging door and onto the pier. Now this pier reached out into the Atlantic at least three football fields but under Grandpa’s guidance, we stopped ten yards in the nearest end zone and started drowning shrimp. We fished for on average two hours... or until the beer was gone. Then we would pack up everything into his big old Chrysler and reverse the process with Grandpa citing the wisdom of the ages, That’s why they call it fishing and not catching because some days the fish win. With Grandpa Jim, the fish always won. By the time I was twelve, we stopped going fishing with Grandpa Jim. My brother and I were able to harmonize with Grandpa as we went through the swinging door on the pier to Grandpa’s 1959 spotless Chrysler. When asked about going to the end of the pier where people seemed to be catching fish and showing them to us as they passed on our end of the pier, Grandpa would say that we were perfectly positioned for when the fish were spooked by all that stuff and came and took our bait.

I went into the Navy in 1970. Before I joined, I took a road trip with some friends up to Coco Beach to surf and party. On the way home, we just happened to stop for a pee break at that same fishing pier. I asked the man running the place if I could check it out. When I got out to where we were fishing all those times, I laughed so hard that I almost peed in my pants. Pat and I were fishing in about eight to ten inches of water. There was no way we were ever going to catch anything. but our position did have a feature that was much more important to my Grandpa. All of the beautiful young women who walked on the beach were right there for him to see as he drank his six pack and enjoyed time with his grandsons on a beautiful morning in South Florida. As I was standing there laughing my head off with my friends staring at me like I was crazy, I realized where my Dad and I came by our ‘Rascal’ ways. It was genetic and passed down from Grandpa Jim.

Expecting and Enjoying Obligations

During the summertime when we would make the pilgrimage to Pompano Beach to visit Grandpa Jim and Grandma Peggy, we would often find Grandpa Jim standing outside his garage as we pulled up his short driveway. He always knew about when we would arrive. As soon as you got out of the car, the sandpapering would commence as you were enveloped into his strong arms completing the Old Spice and Brylcreem scented hug. Just when you thought you might survive Grandpa Jim’s hug, you were smothered in the massive bosom of Grandma Peggy while still stinging from Grandpa Jim’s sandpaper kisses. My brother Pat, always more clever than me, figured a way out of it, or at least a good delaying tactic by simply blurting out that he was going to pee in his pants if he stopped for even a second. The net result was that while he was ‘peeing,’ I was being hugged to near death.

The garage door would usually be open and you could see the stacked cases of Bavarian Beer. You knew it was baseball season, and who was sponsoring the White Socks television broadcasts in Palm Beach County as soon as you rounded the corner of their street.

Every week during baseball season and for every White Socks game broadcast, Grandpa Jim bought two cases of this one brand of Bavarian beer. He might wash his socks or boxers in that particular beer, but he would never drink it, and he would never dream of watching a ball game without paying his share. Grandpa Jim bought a lot of cases of beer and he gave it all away. He would accost the mail man or the guys delivering furniture to the neighbor down the street, and make them all take at least two cases. As soon as our Corvair pulled up and after the brutal affection was expended, he would get the keys from my mom, open the big trunk in the front of the car, and start loading cases of beer. Gas was about thirty cents a gallon back then, but I know with that trunk filled to the brim with cases of liquid Chicago White Sox TV sponsorship, we got much poorer mileage going home than we did coming up. When we asked why he didn’t drink the beer, he would say, I kennna risk it! It might damage the delicate training that I have given me taste buds all these years, don’t you know! He’d then smile